In January 1987 the INS arrested seven Palestinian students and the Kenyan wife of one — the Los Angeles Eight — and moved to deport them for distributing magazines and raising humanitarian funds associated with the PFLP: activity the FBI conceded would be legal for citizens, prosecuted under the McCarran-Walter Act's Cold War ideological-exclusion clauses. Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh spent the next twenty years fighting removal.

The case became the constitutional test of ideological deportation: courts repeatedly found the government had targeted the eight for protected speech, Congress repealed and replaced the statutes beneath the case, and in 2007 an immigration judge ended it as "an embarrassment to the rule of law." The LA 8 template — immigration law as the political weapon against Palestine activism — would return, undiminished, two decades later.